Deja Vu with Quixotic Delusions of Grandeur

"On a balmy October afternoon in 1971 I found myself on my back on a street in South San Francisco, my left shoulder blade pinned to the curb. I had tripped....(and) there was a lanky young man with an unsettling ferocity in his eyes standing over me, pointing a handgun at my face..."

Though this typical public-schooled suburban American kid becomes a doctor with the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers movement, the opening lines of Marc Sapir's memoir reveal a life of disorderly chaos. From a radical disruptive anti-war medical student at Stanford, Sapir became a Public Health official, then accidentally first medical director of an all-inclusive team-based health program for disabled elders, caring for, writing and editing books about (and by) those elders. He coordinated development of Berkeley's high school health center and later operationalized a methodology in public opinion polling that explains systematic deception in opinion research. Labeling himself a failed communist, the grandfather of 6 and playwright battles for working class egalitarian ideals while wandering around like a dement. Sapir inserts commentaries on social de-evolution, language, literature and cosmology, distilled through living during the holocaust and exposure to Oliver Sacks' oeuvre and support. Youngster Marc dreamed of composing music and writing but, being a "good Jewish kid", he caved to parental pressure and became "my son the doctor,"...in the beginning.